Personal data of 1.8 million Chicago voters accidentally exposed by vendor

The L.A. Times reports:

Data on 1.8 million Chicago voters, including addresses, phone numbers and partial Social Security numbers, were left exposed on a downloadable cloud-storage site operated by an Omaha election-services company until a cybersecurity researcher discovered it, the company said Thursday.

The data appeared to have been produced for the November 2016 election and were discovered by a researcher working for Mountain View, Calif.-based UpGuard on Aug. 11. UpGuard revealed the problem to the company, Election Systems & Software, and the data were promptly secured, UpGuard officials said.

Election officials were notified of the problem at 5:37 p.m. and had secured the data by 9:44 p.m. the same evening, said Chicago Board of Election Commissioners spokesman James Allen.

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